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Desade

Member

Registered: 2012-01-31

Posts: 7

[SOLVED] Softlink Abuse Leading to Tears

I have the following partition layout (skipping boot and swap):
100GB SSD mounts to /
2TB HDD mounts to /caviar

After installing, I realized that I didn't really want /var on the SSD because of its write-happy lifestyle. Being a chronic abuser of softlinks, instead of repartitioning the HDD, I simply booted into single-user mode and:

mkdir /caviar/var
mv (recursive, maintain permissions, etc etc) /var/* /caviar/var/
ln -s /caviar/var /var

Everything went fine for a long time. Then I updated filesystem (the package) yesterday and it created relative links in /var to "../run" and "../run/lock". The assumption, obviously, is that /var/../run == /run, but this assumption isn't true on my system because of my history of softlink abuse. This, in turn, led to KDE refusing to start with the error message:

kdm[962]: Cannot create/lock pid file /var/run/kdm.pid

I easily "solved" the problem by simply changing the filesystem-package-created softlinks to be absolute (-> /run) instead of relative (-> ../run). But won't this require me to do this every time pacman updates filesystem? Should I just bite the bullet and repartition, or can I get away with this for a while?

Last edited by Desade (2012-06-24 10:53:49)

SS4

Member

From: !Rochford, Essex

Registered: 2010-12-05

Posts: 699

Re: [SOLVED] Softlink Abuse Leading to Tears

Why not mount /cavair/var as /var in fstab?

edit: I may not have made myself clear before, what I meant is to create an entry in fstab that would mount the partition that you made on caviar as /var and delete the symlink.

Last edited by SS4 (2012-06-17 13:19:46)

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Desade

Member

Registered: 2012-01-31

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED] Softlink Abuse Leading to Tears

You're talking about a mount --bind, yes? I need to research this, thanks for the advice.

SS4

Member

From: !Rochford, Essex

Registered: 2010-12-05

Posts: 699

Re: [SOLVED] Softlink Abuse Leading to Tears

Ah, I misunderstood. I read you'd put /caviar/var on a separate partition. mount --bind should work but I'm not sufficiently au fait with it to recommend any more. I don't think filesystems is updated that often so you could use ABS to change the options as you do at the moment.

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Desade

Member

Registered: 2012-01-31

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED] Softlink Abuse Leading to Tears

After filesystem upgraded recently (I picked it up this morning), of course my custom soft-links were broken again. Happily, I noticed that filesystem was updating before I rebooted, and this prompted me to actually resolve this (hopefully) permanently. I went with the bind-mount suggestion that SS4 (possibly inadvertently) came up with, and preliminary indications are positive!

So what I did was:

sudo init 1
rm /var   # the soft-link that points to /caviar/var
mkdir /var
echo "/caviar/var /var none bind" >> /etc/fstab
reboot

Joy.